This invention involves a sun visor for a motor vehicle and, more particularly, an apparatus directed to the problem of shielding the driver of a motor vehicle from the glare of the sun when it is close to the horizon. Also, more particularly, the invention is directed to an apparatus that supplements the standard sun visor in motor vehicles.
When driving early or late in the day directly at the sun, the driver may be blinded causing a highly hazardous condition. The standard sun visor is of little help in that if it is positioned to completely blot out the sun, the driver cannot see the road. A variety of supplementary sun visor devices have been provided, but none give a satisfactory solution for the problem.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,445,135 to Masi, a supplementary perforated visor is clipped on to the bottom of the standard sun visor and may be rotated downwardly to partially shield the sun. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,090,732 to Vistitsky, a supplementary sun visor is provided utilizing an opaque panel and a semitransparent tinted panel that again partially reduces the sun's glare or almost completely hides the roadway. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,736,979 to Harvey, an auxiliary sun visor is provided where a panel extending downwardly from the bottom edge of the sun visor may be slid horizontally from side to side to block the sun. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,473 to Hildebrand, a sun-shade auxiliary device is provided wherein an entire bank of vertically hinged panels may be slid from side to side horizontally and the entire bank of panels may be hinged on a horizontal axis only as an integral unit. A rollable sun visor with moveable sections is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,855,241 to Walter. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,356,192 to Schierau, a semitransparent panel is attached to and extends down from the standard vehicle visor. Likewise, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,159,421 to Samuelson, a tinted transparent panel is hingeably connected to the standard sun visor. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,848,822 to Da Costa, a hingeably attached extension for motor vehicles visor is described. A hinged transparent tinted panel is attached to the standard sun visor in the diagrams of Italian Patent Number 366,577.
These devices either do not satisfactorily attend to the problem or they fail to attain the objects described herein below.